Michele di Matteo Lambertini

This large gold altarpiece is almost the whole reason Michele di Matteo has a name today. He was a painter from Bologna working in the late Gothic style in the first half of the 1400s, and much of his life is a blank, but along the bottom of this polyptych he signed it in Latin, Michele di Matteo from Bologna made this.

It was made for a chapel in the Venetian church of Sant'Elena, built to hold relics of Saint Helena, the mother of the emperor Constantine, who by legend found the True Cross in Jerusalem. In the center the Virgin adores the Christ Child among angels, flanked by female saints, with a Crucifixion above. Along the base, in a strip of small scenes, Helena's story plays out, the search for the cross and its discovery.

The whole thing is built the old way, each saint boxed in its own gilded compartment rather than sharing one space, at the very moment other Italian painters were dissolving those frames into a single room. It came to the Accademia when the Sant'Elena chapel was dismantled.